A hot topic in online marketing today is behavioral targeting of online consumers. The purpose being to build a profile of what individuals are interested in based on the websites they visit and guess which types of ads would be the most relevant to them. While this method does provide a much more educated guess at which ads should be served and drive up CPM rates for publishers it is still at the core just a guess.

Google has found a way to take the guess work out with what is a glaringly obvious solution: Just have their users tell them directly the types of ads they want to see. On March 11th Google introduced a new feature called Google Ad Preferences. If you use the feature it will change the types of ads you see while surfing the internet.